Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (6 page)

When Capa at last headed back to Paris he knew he had some good pictures in his camera; he knew, too, that the odds were stacked against the promises the Peace Pilgrims had just made so solemnly. He’d seen enough of the world to figure out what was coming: he might be only twenty-two, but he was already a political refugee twice over. As a teenager in Budapest—son of a spendthrift carriage-trade dressmaker and his hardworking wife—he’d gotten involved in avant-garde and antifascist circles, joining in demonstrations against Admiral Miklós Horthy’s iron-fisted and anti-Semitic regime; shortly before he passed his final examinations he’d made the mistake of being seen talking to a known Communist Party recruiter. That night Horthy’s secret police picked him up and took him for “questioning” to headquarters, where his interrogator, an officer with a taste for Beethoven, whistled the Fifth Symphony while beating him up in time to the music. In an act of teenage bravado he’d laughed at his tormentor, after which two thugs knocked him senseless and threw him into a cell; the next morning, since there was no hard evidence against him, they’d turned him loose with orders to leave the country as soon as possible.

So he’d gone to Berlin, whose Weimar-era adventurousness had only just begun to be tainted by encroaching Nazi brutality, and enrolled in journalism classes at the Hochschule für Politik, where all the young bohemians went; but hard times put an end to the allowance he’d been receiving from his parents, and he had to drop out of school. Hungry, homeless, desperate for money, he talked himself into a job as a darkroom assistant at Dephot, one of the agencies that had sprung up to supply the new illustrated magazines and newspaper supplements that suddenly seemed to be everywhere. His good eye and his eagerness earned him a few small assignments, and then came a big break: Sent to cover a Copenhagen speech by the exiled Russian leader Leon Trotsky, he smuggled his flashless little Leica into the lecture hall, where bulky box cameras, which might have concealed a gun, were prohibited, and captured Trotsky at the podium at point-blank range.
Der Welt Spiegel
gave his dramatic pictures a full page—
with
a credit—but his triumph was short-lived. Three months later, Adolf Hitler, riding a tide of anti-Semitic nationalism, was appointed chancellor of Germany; a month after that, the new government suspended all civil liberties, banned publications “unfriendly” to the National Socialists—the Nazis—and started rounding up Communists, Social Democrats, liberals, and Jews. Berlin, already unsettled, was now unsafe, and André Friedmann was on the run again.

Like many other refugees from Nazism, he ended up in Paris; despite the French economic downturn, it was still the place where everything was happening—art, theater, literature, philosophy, fashion,
le jazz hot
. As an émigré, however, he couldn’t get a regular job when so many Frenchmen were out of work, so he subsisted on a variety of short-term, low-paying gigs, cadging meals or money or cigarettes from acquaintances, shoplifting the occasional loaf of bread or tin of sardines, or making do with sugar dissolved in water, a trick he’d learned in his lean times in Berlin. That was when the Crédit Municipal pawnshop came in handy—he used to say he’d left his camera “chez ma tante”; when the money from his “aunt,” the pawnbroker, ran out he’d simply slip out of whatever cheap Left Bank hotel room he’d been calling home for the past few months (chronically behind on the rent, but with such charming excuses to the proprietor) and leave his few belongings behind, never to return.

Despite his poverty, he was proud; even if he had to ask for a handout he did it as if it didn’t matter whether he got it or not. “Why work at little things that bring no money?” he’d say, scornfully. “Wait for the big things, the big moment you can sell.” When he
did
make money there would be drinks for everyone at the Dôme, at the crossroads of the Boulevard Montparnasse and the Boulevard Raspail—La Coupole, just down the street, was too expensive; or dinner at La Diamenterie, the Middle Eastern restaurant on the rue Lafayette. For by this time he had a group of pals,
copains
, that included the refugee Pole David Szymin, a chess-playing staff photographer for the Communist weekly paper
Regards
, whom everyone called Chim; his own boyhood friend from Budapest, Geza Korvin Karpathi; and Henri Cartier-Bresson, the son of a prosperous Normandy textile merchant, who’d started out to be a painter before being seduced by photography.

Then, one day, there was Gerda, or Gerta, as she spelled it then: a petite green-eyed girl with artfully arched eyebrows and hennaed hair cut short like a boy’s and a sharp little face—“like a fox that is going to play a trick on you,” said a friend of his later. He’d met her through her roommate, a German secretary named Ruth Cerf, whom he’d asked to pose for some advertising photos he was shooting. Cerf, put off by his scruffy appearance—
I’m not going anywhere alone with this guy
, she told herself;
he looks like a tramp
—had brought Gerda with her as a chaperone; to Cerf’s surprise, the chaperone and the scruffy photographer hit it off immediately.

They had nothing, and everything, in common. Like him, she was Jewish—but her father, a Pole named Heinrich Pohorylle, was a prosperous egg merchant in Stuttgart, not an improvident Hungarian dressmaker. She’d been expensively educated, following
gymnasium
with a fancy Swiss finishing school, where she learned French, English, and the art of making influential friends; then business college, where she took Spanish and typing. Smart, vivacious, ambitious, and chic—as a teenager she’d always worn high heels to her classes, even when on a field trip to Lake Constance—she was already skilled at keeping several men on a string simultaneously. While still in school she’d become engaged to a wealthy thirty-five-year-old cotton trader, then disengaged when she got involved with a charismatic Marxist medical student, Georg Kuritzkes, a member of the German Socialist Workers’ Party, or SAP (Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei). Kuritzkes introduced her to his crowd of committed young SAP activists, among them a strong-jawed youth named Herbert Frahm, who would later change his name to Willy Brandt; and one of the SAP boys—another medical student, Willi Chardack—also fell for her. “I just have to wiggle my little finger to have five or six guys after me,” she wrote to a friend, amusedly. “I’m continually amazed that it’s possible to be in love with two men at the same time—but I’d be an idiot to wonder why.”

She and André Friedmann had both had brushes with the fascist police, too; and like him she’d refused to be cowed by the experience. Held in prison for two weeks after helping to write, edit, and distribute anti-Nazi leaflets before the 1933 German parliamentary elections, she’d shared smuggled cigarettes with the other women inmates, taught them American popular songs, and showed them how to communicate with each other during lockdown by tapping on the walls of their cells—all the while telling her captors she was just a silly girl who didn’t know anything about politics. When an outraged letter from the Polish consul at last secured her release (technically, she was a Polish citizen) she fled to Paris, but the city was hardly more hospitable to her than it had been to the young Hungarian photographer. Even though she found friends from Germany such as Ruth Cerf and Willi Chardack, she couldn’t get a residency permit, so she had to work off the books as a secretary for starvation wages. The room she shared with Ruth was so cold, and they had so little money for food, that on winter weekends they’d stay in bed all day to keep warm and conserve energy before venturing out to their favorite haunt, the café La Capoulade on the corner of the Boulevard Saint-Michel and the rue Soufflot, where they could huddle next to one of the huge charcoal braziers to talk politics and philosophy.

Maybe because Gerta preferred the company of the Sorbonne students, political theorists, and exiled SAP members at the Capoulade, while André liked the more freewheeling artistic atmosphere at the Dôme, they saw little of each other in the months after their first meeting, although Gerta did give him story ideas and big-sisterly advice about what clothes to wear or what to read. (Left to himself, he’d read detective stories; she was more inclined to books like John Dos Passos’s epic modernist novels
Manhattan Transfer
and
1919
, the story of John Reed, “the last of the great race of war correspondents who ducked under censorship and risked their skins for a story.”) By this time she was in a liaison with Willi Chardack—her old flame Georg Kuritzkes had gone to study medicine in Italy—while André was having a desultory affair with a striking red-haired German fashion photographer named Regina Langquarz, who called herself Relang and sometimes let André use her darkroom. But in the spring of 1935, while he was in Spain shooting two assignments for his old Dephot boss, he’d written Gerta a letter in which, after describing the Holy Week celebrations in Seville where “half [the people] are drunk [and] the crowd is so thick that one can get away with fondling the breasts of all the señoritas,” he confessed that “sometimes … I’m completely in love with you.”

Gerta kept him at arm’s length until that summer; but then she invited him to accompany her and Willi Chardack—with whom she was no longer romantically involved—and another male friend to the tiny island of Ste. Marguérite in the south of France, a half-hour’s ferry ride from Cannes. For almost three months the four young people lived on tinned sardines and slept in tents under the umbrella pines near the fortress where the Man in the Iron Mask had been imprisoned; during the long sunlit days they rambled over the island’s
garrigue
or swam in the sea, and André taught Gerta how to use his camera. Soon the two of them had become lovers. When they returned to Paris in the fall, suntanned and inseparable, André told the Hungarian photographer André Kertesz, who had become a mentor, “Never before in my whole life have I been so happy!”

Gerta took him in hand, as if he were a school project. “It’s impossible how you live,” she told him. Together they found a modern one-room apartment in the Seventh Arrondissement with a view of the Eiffel Tower; although its divan bed was so narrow they couldn’t both sleep on their backs at the same time, it had a tiny kitchen where they could prepare meals (“I do the washing up and break all the glasses,” he wrote to his mother), so they spent less time (and money) in cafés. They began working together, André shooting photographs and Gerta typing up accompanying stories to submit to magazines, or Gerta taking photographs and André making enlargements; soon he got her a full-time job as a sales representative for the photo agent Maria Eisner, his friend from Berlin days. “Because Gerta is so pretty, the editors buy from her,” he boasted; and it didn’t hurt that she spoke three languages and could negotiate with foreign clients. She’d already persuaded André to start wearing a necktie and have his hair cut—“It has a part in it, and I am shaved to hell,” he half-complained; now she spent one of her early paychecks to buy him a winter coat.

Gerta wasn’t like any girl he’d ever had before; she was sensual and direct, with no sense of
pudeur
. She’d entertain friends while she was half-naked, bathing or dressing; and her enjoyment of their lovemaking seemed uncomplicated by anxiety that she might get pregnant—probably because she had a clever gynecologist who made such fears irrelevant. André was devastated when their relationship hit a bad patch in December—maybe, some of their friends thought, he was upset that Gerta slept with other men if she felt like it. Others thought she was pressuring him to be more committed politically, and he jokingly resisted:
ugh, those Party girls are too ugly for me
. In any case Gerta moved out; André, desolate, ill, and in despair over a temporary lack of work, considered abandoning photography altogether. By the spring, though, they’d made up—if you loved Gerta, you forgave her, no matter what—and they were living, and working, together again, in a room at the Hôtel de Blois in the rue Vavin. André had scored a contract with Maria Eisner’s Alliance Photo agency that paid him a thousand francs a month for shooting enough material for three
reportages
a week.

But he and Gerta wanted more, and faster; and in April they cooked up a brilliant plan. They would reinvent themselves as “Robert Capa,” a rich, famous (and imaginary) American photographer, whose pictures would actually be taken by André, with Gerta, in her job at Alliance, cutting deals for their publication with magazines and newspapers. “What, you don’t know who he is?” she’d ask derisively; and then, because “Capa” was so famous, demand that editors pay three times the prevailing rate for his photographs. If anyone wanted to actually meet the elusive lensman, she’d put them off by saying, “That bastard has run off to the Côte d’Azur again with an actress.”

At the same time as this pseudonym made its debut, Gerta also decided to give
herself
a new name: Gerda Taro. Like “Robert Capa,” it was short, glamorous, of indeterminate ethnicity, the sort of name that makes you think you must already have heard of it.
Oh, of course, Gerda Taro. Isn’t she a movie star? A poet? A photographer?
Writing to his mother about his own transformation, Capa said, “It is like being born again (but this time without hurting anybody!).” He might have been writing about Gerda as well. From this time on each acquired a secondary self, a cosmopolitan, successful doppelgänger that was all they had each strived to be, and were now becoming.

For things were looking up: the strikes and Popular Front demonstrations of the spring were full of opportunities for the kind of vivid, visceral pictures that were becoming the young photographer’s trademark. Then, in June, just before he went to Verdun to cover the peace demonstrations, the newly born Robert Capa had his first scoop. Italy had just invaded Abyssinia, and the country’s deposed emperor, Haile Selassie, was appearing before the League of Nations to ask for sanctions against the invaders, something the League, in the end, declined to do. In Geneva to photograph the proceedings, Capa witnessed a much more compelling drama than the staid images of delegates the other news photographers focused on: the arrest of a protester, who was thrown into an open police car and bound and gagged right in front of Capa’s camera. The resulting pictures, more than anyone else’s, told you what was
really
going on in Geneva: that the League of Nations, designed to be a peaceful forum to settle international grievances, had become nothing but a place to silence them.